Content providers often make content available on different operating environments, such as through a general purpose webpage, on television, and on small mobile electronic devices. Doing so presents various challenges. For example, a content provider may provide a news story on a general website and to mobile device users. A photograph suitable for use on the general website may be too large for use on mobile devices upon which relevant details of the photograph are lost. Simply scaling the image down may not address the problem. For example, an image of a football team that is scaled down to the size of a thumbnail may be undesirable because relevant details are not recognizable. Thus, it is often desirable to create different versions of content specifically for each operating environment on which the content will be offered. Unfortunately, doing so can require creating and managing multiple sets of assets for these different operating environments, significantly increasing the complexity and expense of offering the content.
Making content available on mobile devices presents specific challenges. For example, a channel format may be used to provide content on mobile devices in which the channel format remains constant while the content presented within it changes over time. An exemplary channel may have a list of periodically updated news items in which the content of each news item is presented in a consistent container (such as, for example, according to an image place holder and a text placeholder) that provides a consistent news item format. Each time a new news item is published, an item rendered may put an image in an image placeholder space and fill a text field with the text. Generally, a channel format may be developed to include such containers and then deployed onto a content server where it is merged periodically with content provided by a content provider that is then made available to mobile devices on the channel.
A content provider may use a content management application with various content authoring features, such as an image, video, and text editing features. For example, to create a story, a journalist may enter a story into various fields of a content management tool, such as, for example, fields for a short headline, long headline, body text, and use a photo editor to add one or more images. In many cases, content is created primarily for print or web and then this content is scaled or otherwise manipulated programmatically for use on other operating environments. Unfortunately, journalists and other content providers are not constrained or guided with respect to the content they provide and have no easy way of selecting appropriate content for a given operating environment, such as, for example, for a given channel format. It is also often difficult to ensure or test that the content will appear as intended, especially in the context of television and mobile operating environments. In the case of channel content, after the initial design and authoring of the channel format, content providers are often not aware of the appearance of their content in the channel on a day-to-day basis without looking at the actual channel on a targeted device.
For various reasons, content received at a content server for a given operating environment does not always have the appearance intended by a provider. The content experience is often not as good as the provider would like especially on operating environments, such as on a mobile device, for which the content was not originally created. A developer may attempt to manage this deficiency by providing additional code to address non-conforming assets, for example, by resizing images, removing, truncating, and adding text, and/or requiring manual revision of content/format. These techniques frequently are insufficient. Truncating text, for example, can be very damaging to the meaning of the text's message. Similarly, text that is too short and fails to fill up the available space creates undesirable whitespace that is difficult to remedy effectively. Moreover, generally, the only content restrictions and guidance placed on content providers to help them provide content that is appropriate for a given operating environment are self imposed restrictions. While content providers could separately create content for each operating environment, doing so may significantly raise costs of providing the content. Accordingly, among other things, systems and methods that facilitate the creation and/or use of smarter, more efficient, and/or better informed and better restricted content for multiple operating environments are needed.